Tech innovation is killing jobs, not foreign scapegoats, and revolt after Trump will be Luddite

The tech industry played an influential role in the outcome of the US Presidential election. Not just in providing the medium for Fake News and propaganda.

The root cause is job destruction by Automation — that drove a base of dissatisfied rust-belt voters to support Trump. Job destruction is accelerating, and if Tech doesn’t get ahead of this problem, there will be a significant populist backlash against the industry and it’s ability to progress.

50% of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way.

A recent study found 50% of occupations today will be gone by 2020, and a 2013 Oxford study forecasted that 47% of jobs will be automated by 2034. A Ball State study found that only 13% of manufacturing job losses were due to trade, the rest from automation. A McKinsey study suggests 45% of knowledge work activity can be automated.

94% of the new job creation since 2005 is in the gig economy. These aren’t stable jobs with benefits on a career path. And if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job. Amazon has 270k employees, but most are soon-t0-be-automated ops and fulfillment. Facebook has 15k employees and a 330B market cap, and Snapchat in August had double their market cap per employee, at $48M per employee. The economic impact of Tech was raising productivity, but productivity and wages have been stagnant in recent years.

The future of work isn’t a new debate. But it is very unevenly distributed. Doug Engelbart pioneered augmentation just as most of his SRI colleagues were thinking through AI for automation. We’ve tilted towards automation in the latest golden age of AI. Automation is yielding benefits for the few, while many of the best minds of augmentation are optimizing the feed of advertising. I’ve got a bet I’m putting most of my time behind that knowledge work will survive and be augmented instead of automated away, but that’s another post.

We are at the beginning of the fourth technological wave of innovation. After agricultural, industrial and information ages, there’s something else. Defined not by the ability to store, compute and transmit information. But the generative properties of machine and human intelligence. The Singularity isn’t near, but what you see today in early AI is like the telegraph during the industrial age, analog turning digital, and that’s another post.

The canary in the coal mine is trucking. Truck Driver is the number one job in the US of A. Driving a truck is a respectable job that pays well enough to provide for a family without a lot of education. Uber Freight is taking orders, powered by Otto. The $680M acquisition of 91 employees, is am effective valuation of $7.5M per employee. Or you could say $200 per US trucking job killed.

Let’s try to humanize this for the geeks in the valley. Someone at your holiday family table will lose their job. Imagine that person is a truck driver. You know those high school friends on your Facebook? Some of them will lose their jobs and their families. Knowing all this is going to happen, what do you tell them? What can they really do?

Maybe someone has 2 years and resources to retrain themselves. But if half the jobs are gone in 20 years, how many times will they have to retrain? What should kids study now knowing this?

But let’s stay in our valley of thought. Hey, YC has a Basic Income experiment alongside some socialist countries! People won’t have to work for a living. Pot is legal now, districts are gerrymandered, and we’ll find new thing to sell them that will give them purpose. Someone needs to explain to me how Basic Income isn’t the most politically unrealistic idea of our time.

Being a Luddite in modern terms has been broadly people not adopting technology. Like people that didn’t “get blogging.” But the term comes from the people who destroyed laborsaving devices in the British textile industry during the industrial revolution. They acted on orders from a mythical general Ned Ludd to rebel against the technology that was destroying their jobs.

In 4–8 years there will be a populist politician that will point the finger at the Tech Industry as enemy number one. In a way, Trump already has. This person will yield a backlash against Tech that will stunt progress and make it an instrument of her or his control far worse. This is more than stones hurled at Google Busses. When people start to feel their unhappiness is because of Tech, the post-truth era of Trump and post-ethics of the GOP elite will pale in comparison to the real movements someone could control.

Tech still has time. Lean your products towards augmentation and job creation. Solidify your principles for what is humanely right against fear-mongering and scapegoating. Foster education, and not just what worked for you, but what junior colleges can do to help people transition. Tech company policy needs to go beyond the regulations that risk a single company wants to manage, and reflect it’s inherently progressive value set. Admit disruption is a bad word, and at least cause-relate your marketing and mission.

I think we failed to account for the whole picture when we created social, and instead just pretended neutrality in connecting people was good enough. Joi Ito in Whiplash:

We are now in a phase of emergent democracy that is quite distressing. But witnessing this has given those of us who held such optimism a decade ago even greater resolve to develop both the tools and momentum to fulfill our original dream of the technology advancing democracy in a positive way.

Tech can do more than grow. It can do good. And it doesn’t, bad things will happen.

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CEO and co-founder of Pingpad, making social productivity as instant, simple and social as messaging. Previously VP at SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn), Co-Founder, CEO at Socialtext (the enterprise social software pioneer) and RateXchange (a B2B bandwidth exchange)

6 responses to “The Coming Tech Backlash”

There’s an easy answer to all those people you described as about to lose their jobs: *Clears throat* “Go back to school and get interested in how much we’re charging for college you lazy loser asshole! Math was never too hard for you, you just wrongly believed you didn’t need to suffer through it like the rest of us because you could be a truck driver and tread water till you die!”

“Did you think the increasing gap between the rich and poor was a coincidence? It’s because way too many people have been looking at continuing education after high school ended, and deciding that doing difficult work wasn’t required of them. You’re not a moron, now stop contributing to the reason some people think Idiocracy might happen and get studying! Because, and this is the real secret, the kids of parents that didn’t go to college have huge barriers keeping them from going to college, and in the future there won’t be jobs for people that don’t have a useful degree.”

“Quit screwing up not only your own life, but your kids’ lives. You think voting for a Billionaire with a Masters in Business will excuse you from doing the difficult but necessary? Thinking that he even could change the system shows how little thought you actually put into that plan. Blowing up the government means the checks, balances and personal rights you’ve relied on your entire life are either about to disappear on you right as you need them most. Alternatively, Trump has already made overt attempts to profit from becoming President, which is an impeachable offense and the party leadership doesn’t exactly like Trump.”

“Most importantly, this article points out the most important lie you’ve been told. Jobs aren’t being outsourced, they’re being automated. That revenue isn’t leaving the US, you just aren’t qualified to earn it. You want your job back? A computer is currently doing it better than you ever could have, and people will actually be happy about the reduced number of accidents on the road, and business will be thrilled about how reliable delivery times become. So no, you can’t have that job at the expense of everyone else. Grow up, and get a real job.”

No, there is not any clear answer to this problem. Thinking within the box will not work because the box is falling apart.

Like so many others, I have long pondered these issues, and my conclusions are:
1. Our entire world is going to collapse, along with the box, of course. And in not too distant a time, say 50-100 years.
2. During the collapse we stand a fair chance of destroying our planet, so far as future life is concerned; a natural consequence of the collapse of all advanced, carefully managed, societies.
3. If we do not completely blow things apart, it will only be because some social force, most likely some form of dictatorship, will develop to create a stable situation.
4. If we hope to survive and go forward in the face of this technologically created upheaval then we must develop a social structure that is underpinned with concepts very different than those we have long come to accept as absolute. For example, if machines and computers can produce all the necessities to support humanity, where and how can meaning in life be found.

As you can see, I think this is a much bigger problem than a Luddite backlash.

Inasmuch as the purpose of an economy is to provide livelihoods for all the people (or should be), robotics may need to be slowed down by heavy taxation thereof. And the one-percenters who own all the industries that fancy themselves getting more profitable by laying off workers need to realize when “everybody” is doing that, that they are succeeding in slaughtering each others’ customer bases, and a smaller pie for everyone will result.

“Among the most viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew.”

Another great myth is that “full employment” is the most desirable circumstance for an economy when in fact “full production” is the most desirable circumstance. Jobs are less important than the production of things and services which is the real measuring stick of an economies health.

Will there be a backlash? Yes, there will be a backlash sponsored by the likes of government who has over-regulated to the point of making some jobs impossible to fill and hence a rush to automation instead of allowing it to happen in it’s own time. The government and other “fake news” doomsayers will be quick to point the finger at technology as the woes of mankind. I’m hoping that this time around there will be enough “fake news” to dispel the propaganda.

This article is different from all these type of articles of the past 100 years. In the past everyone wrote that technology would see jobs shortened and more leisure time with each person somehow getting money for that leisure time. It was not clear how that would workin the past. My dad always asked “which boss will pay them to spend 50 years doing nothing”.

Then we the consumer made the Military Industrial Complex aware of consumer products and it became a consumer industrial complex selling technology. We used the technology to niche profits out of the rest of society.

No one but the Military can spend $1million for a lap top. So to fuel that technology we the west, that is consumers bought consistently cheap. We found places buy goods from “slave ” enablement, from China or Mexico or some poorer slob than me land. Conveniently now slaves are out of site and controlled by others and we have $50 lap tops and tablets.

What we all forgot, is that the market is free, and that the free market always wins, it just takes time.

What we can do one supposes, is distribute wealth differently, intelligently, but that ignores the free market.

The answer is one suspects, that wealth generation, must continue but that we need cheap energy to make possible better lives for everyone. We may need to substitute life time as our measure of wealth. Time is something we cannot hoard or bank, 80 years is 80 years.

GrumpyBear was too busy studying math to work on his literacy skills, or he would have seen that most white-collar jobs are being outsourced, too. But apparently, he didn’t study enough statistics to understand the part about how “retooling” in an era where jobs will be rapidly lost is inherently placing money on a losing bet.

Thanks for the article. I, for one, am rooting for a tech-revolt. Our western approach to technology for technology’s sake no longer correlates to “progress” or to human happiness.

At its base, automation is the conversion of potentially sustainable human energy sources to completely unsustainable (mostly fossil) energy sources. There’s a misunderstanding that “unsustainable” means something is bad for dolphins and monarch butterflies. Actually, it means a thing literally cannot continue. Automation literally cannot continue without unforseen, and unforseeable breakthroughs in energy technology and energy distribution systems. Roller coaster society will automate jobs like mad, cause a massive loss of human capital and traditional labor skills, then increasingly require unskilled humans with poor work history to go back to work. Congratuations technocrats, for creating unprecedented misery.